The Make-Believe Maverick

To call Tim Dickinson’s comprehensive bio of John McCain in the latest Rolling Stone anything but a hit piece would be lying, but it is an extremely well-sourced, deeply fascinating hit piece whose most damning statements are quotes from McCain’s own books.

Listen, I hate Republicans so much it gives me energy, but I always thought of John McCain as one of the few respectable guys on the other side, a little misguided, but basically good.  That’s why his recent about-faces on abortion, war, and torture seemed so bizarre.  And if it weren’t for his absolutely disgusting, mean, erratic behavior lately, I would never have believed a story like this, never in a million years:

Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain’s aircraft. Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly of McCain’s stubby A-4, the Navy’s “Tinkertoy Bomber,” into the fire.

McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his bombs “cooked off,” blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers[…]

[…]Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who “stayed to help the pilots fight the fire,” McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the “ready room,” where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room’s closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. “This distressed me considerably,” he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. “I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.”

[…]As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as “some welcome R&R.”

Motherfucker.

Comments

[Carababe]

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POW's, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramamine, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Elderberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramamine never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."
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